Review: Japanese Film Festival Report
I chose the two films I saw from the 2010 Japanese Film Festival – Flowers (2010) and Confessions (2010) – straight from program guide with relatively little research. Flowers had a stellar all-female leading cast in its favour, including Ryoko Hirosue (Departures) and Yu Aoi (Tokyo!), and Confessions was Japan’s entry for the 2011 Oscar’s Best Foreign Language Film (if it doesn’t win the nomination, the odds that it will screen in Melbourne again are pretty slim).
As it turns out, these films have more in common than just appearing in the 2010 JFF together: they share both subject matter and polished production values (possibly reflecting a rejection of the low-budget, handheld camera work that has dominated independent cinema in the last few years). I wish I could say the quality of both films was also on par, but here they differ quite extremely.
Flowers centres around the two-headed beast of female issues, motherhood and marriage, and manages to mishandle both. It follows three generations of Japanese women from the 1930s to 1960s/70s through to the 21st century, carrying an outdated fantasy of a woman’s purpose – to marry and procreate – through the decades. It also celebrates the misguided notion that motherhood is a noble sacrifice that is best suffered silently, which is highlighted by one mother facing a “noble” death in childbirth.
The look of Flowers lies somewhere between a tourism and an SKII promo spot, so it came as no surprise when I discovered that that the film was produced Takuya Onuki, an internationally acclaimed creative director. The project was in fact was conceived by Onuki for Shiseido, and all of the actresses in the film regularly appear in the marketing for its Tsunaki shampoo – which makes sense because they all have great hair. One of the characters’ story arcs actually ends with a new haircut (while, sickeningly enough, Olivia Newton John’s ‘Have You Ever Been Mellow’ plays in the background).
Flowers not only offended me with its small-minded message and condescending delivery, it left me feeling browbeaten by conventional beauty presented as an ideal, as airbrushed woman after airbrushed woman trotted across the screen to deliver the hokey dialogue with a smile or a silent tear, on her way to finding fulfilment in her offspring or husband.
The film attempts to pay tribute to (or style bites, depending how you look at it) Japanese cinema over the decades, reflecting the timeline of the narrative. It’s a strategy that would work to the film’s favour, but the design is about as sophisticated as a McDonalds advertisement. It is films like this that give female-centric cinema a bad name, by not only being boring but also by perpetuating and propagating the most nauseating male ideas of femininity.
Confessions touches on similar subject matter to Flowers with regards to the mother-child bond and boasts equally slick production, which echoes both music videos and advertisements, but that’s where the similarities end. Based on a bestselling Japanese novel of the same name, Confessions spent 4 weeks at the top of the Box Office in Japan, which speaks to the excellent taste of the Japanese film-going community: this film is as devastating as it is beautiful-looking.
The power of a mother’s love gets very different treatment in Confessions. Instead of the silent, self-sacrificing death of Flowers, we see chilling psychological warfare conducted to protect or revenge a child’s life. The film also criticises a mother’s protective urges towards their brood when it is taken to extremes. Not quite the fulfilling family portrait that springs to mind when one considers reproduction, is it?
Confessions echoes many excellent films including Akira Kurosawa Rashomon (in structure) and Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (in both style and subject matter), as well as the brilliant book We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver, who similarly flips mass media’s fantasy of procreation on its head. The film is both realistic and articulate in expressing its unconventional messages.
The pacing of the film is refreshing from the start, opening with a static 20-odd minute monologue (the first confession) from Takako Matsu, who plays a 7th grade teacher. Her cool, even speech, which details a personal violent tragedy, is underscored by the boisterous shouts of her students – until they are suddenly silent. From there, the film jumps back and forth between the monologues/confessions of various students and their parents, building towards a climactic confrontation.
Every element, from the editing to the stunning visuals, works in beautiful harmony to support the tone and narrative of this film. The slick commercial style of the visuals combined with a grey colour palette reflects a moral wasteland, heightening the theme of cold revenge and the bloody release of violence.
The performances are also creepily believable; the actors take a monologue-heavy script and create lifelike characters that ring true, rather than projecting demonised caricatures of evil and wrong-doing. It is hard not to feel something for all of the characters during the film, as horrible as their actions are.
Though the soundtrack (including a track by Radiohead) was powerful when combined with some of the stylised, surreally beautiful slow motion shots of water, or droplets of blood, the feeling of watching a hyper-glossy advertisement or music video was a little jarring.
Confessions manages to be both disturbing and devastating because the emotions (anxiety, ennui, prejudice) and circumstances (school bullying, the rise of teenage violence, abuse of the child protection act) presented in the film seem incredibly real. Though it is a work of fiction Confessions feels unshakably true.
